I once heard a saying that all happy families are the same but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. While not all good movies are the same, it's certainly true that bad movies come in an almost infinite number of varieties. Quicksand would be a particular sort of terrible film known as the "Movie Star Vacation Project". It's where not-all-that-talented people manage to get the money to produce their horrible script solely because one or more genuine movie stars agrees to act in it, but the stars only agree to do it because the film is being shot in a certain location where the star would like to hang out for a couple of months. They don't give a damn whether the movie is any good or not, they just look at it as a paid vacation.
Martin Raikes (Michael Keaton) is a bank examiner who goes to the south of France to check on an allegation of improper financial behavior at a movie studio. Once there, he meets Lela Forin (Judith Godreche), unaware that she's the frontwoman for a Russian mobster named Oleg (Rade Sherbedgia). It turns out Oleg is using the movie studio as a way to launder money, something which Raikes doesn't appear at all close to discovering but Oleg decides to frame him for the murder of a French police official anyway. Raikes has to flee the authorities and become a crime-stopping detective to uncover what's happened to him, something he takes to like a duck to water. Eventually he and Lela team up with Jake Mallows (Michael Caine), an aging British movie star who Oleg has hired to make a pretend film as part of the movie studio facade. There's also this bit about the Russians using the phony French studio to make rape videos and Raike's daughter gets kidnapped and there's this weird subplot back in the U.S. involving Raike's smartass and very pregnant secretary Beth Ann (Kathleen Wilhoite), which seems to exist just to make Quicksand about 15 minutes longer.
The first hour of Quicksand is pretty boring and lame. The highlight of it is largely Raikes being chased by French police through a tunnel. Yeah, that's the best moment. Raikes grabs a handy shovel and uses it to knock out some lights, which somehow causes the police to lose track of him even though the tunnel remains brightly lit at all times. Even for a melodrama where it's more about running and shouting and blowing stuff up than making any sense, the lack of any sort of realistic behavior or action is quite apparent. This is supposed to be one of those stories about an ordinary guy ripped out of his ordinary life and his desperate struggle to escape from the foreign "quicksand" into which he's plunged. But while these filmmakers have clearly watched those sorts of movies, they clearly don't understand how to tell that story themselves. This is like one of those bad episodes from the later seasons of Miami Vice, with an extra 30 minutes tacked on. Yeah, it's that terrible.
The last half hour of this film, however, is more than just boring and lame. It descends into a bizarre and apparently unintentional parody. At least it's unintentional for the filmmakers. There's a point where you can tell Michael Keaton has figured out just how much this movie sucks and decides to see how far he can push the suck. It's not that he phones in his performance, but he doesn't bother to try and salvage anything decent of this mess. He just goes full bore, almost as though he wants to deliberately emphasize how silly and simplistic the story becomes. That's unlike Michael Caine, who does the same professional job and takes the story as seriously as he does anything else.
There's no way Keaton and Caine were paid a lot of money to do this film and even though Caine is a old-school actor who'll take almost any job offered to him, you know the only reason they're in this is because when they weren't on set, they could lounge around Europe on the producer's dime. That's a pretty sweet deal for them. It's fairly sour for those of us unlucky enough to watch Quicksand.
Martin Raikes (Michael Keaton) is a bank examiner who goes to the south of France to check on an allegation of improper financial behavior at a movie studio. Once there, he meets Lela Forin (Judith Godreche), unaware that she's the frontwoman for a Russian mobster named Oleg (Rade Sherbedgia). It turns out Oleg is using the movie studio as a way to launder money, something which Raikes doesn't appear at all close to discovering but Oleg decides to frame him for the murder of a French police official anyway. Raikes has to flee the authorities and become a crime-stopping detective to uncover what's happened to him, something he takes to like a duck to water. Eventually he and Lela team up with Jake Mallows (Michael Caine), an aging British movie star who Oleg has hired to make a pretend film as part of the movie studio facade. There's also this bit about the Russians using the phony French studio to make rape videos and Raike's daughter gets kidnapped and there's this weird subplot back in the U.S. involving Raike's smartass and very pregnant secretary Beth Ann (Kathleen Wilhoite), which seems to exist just to make Quicksand about 15 minutes longer.
The first hour of Quicksand is pretty boring and lame. The highlight of it is largely Raikes being chased by French police through a tunnel. Yeah, that's the best moment. Raikes grabs a handy shovel and uses it to knock out some lights, which somehow causes the police to lose track of him even though the tunnel remains brightly lit at all times. Even for a melodrama where it's more about running and shouting and blowing stuff up than making any sense, the lack of any sort of realistic behavior or action is quite apparent. This is supposed to be one of those stories about an ordinary guy ripped out of his ordinary life and his desperate struggle to escape from the foreign "quicksand" into which he's plunged. But while these filmmakers have clearly watched those sorts of movies, they clearly don't understand how to tell that story themselves. This is like one of those bad episodes from the later seasons of Miami Vice, with an extra 30 minutes tacked on. Yeah, it's that terrible.
The last half hour of this film, however, is more than just boring and lame. It descends into a bizarre and apparently unintentional parody. At least it's unintentional for the filmmakers. There's a point where you can tell Michael Keaton has figured out just how much this movie sucks and decides to see how far he can push the suck. It's not that he phones in his performance, but he doesn't bother to try and salvage anything decent of this mess. He just goes full bore, almost as though he wants to deliberately emphasize how silly and simplistic the story becomes. That's unlike Michael Caine, who does the same professional job and takes the story as seriously as he does anything else.
There's no way Keaton and Caine were paid a lot of money to do this film and even though Caine is a old-school actor who'll take almost any job offered to him, you know the only reason they're in this is because when they weren't on set, they could lounge around Europe on the producer's dime. That's a pretty sweet deal for them. It's fairly sour for those of us unlucky enough to watch Quicksand.